The Chainsaw Bike

A few weeks back, Al came over to Sheffield to demo an Edit and have a chat about a custom bike he wanted to put together. He had a budget to work to, which is not uncommon, but wanted to change things around a little bit. And he has a special request; he wanted to do something to honour his favourite rider: the late, great Stevie Smith. This is The Chainsaw Bike.

Custom Build

All our bikes are built to order, and we very often build custom bikes for people. Most people start with one of our standard builds; either the Edit Trail or Edit Pro, and change things around a little bit. Al demoed the Edit Trail and was super happy with it, but wanted to change up the wheelset so we swapped out the standard wheels for a Hope Tech Pro 4 Enduro wheelset, and added a Hope dropper seat clamp to go with them.

The new Truvativ Descendant range has some lovely components for all-mountain and enduro bikes, so we went with the new Descendant 40mm stem. Before he passed away, Stevie had developed a signature handlebar and Truvativ went ahead with it (with permission from Stevie's family). They're not in the UK yet but we managed to source a set from Germany and those bars became the inspiration for Al's custom decals.

A proportion of the sales from every Truvativ Descendant CoLab bar goes to support the Stevie Smith Legacy Fund.

Custom Decals

We're a bit different in that we produce all our decals in-house. That means we can produce custom decals for any customer that wants to personalise their bike, for a small charge. The first step was to develop the graphics in software, and get Al's approval.

Once the design is finalised, we cut the decals on our plotter, and then the painstaking process of "weeding" began. This is where decals can get really time consuming, but it's worth putting the effort in. And this is one of the ways in which an Airdrop bike is different to anything you can buy off-the-peg: the amount of time we spend on each bike and the amount of work that's done by hand.

The Finished Bike

All our bikes are different, but some are also a bit special. So before boxing it up and sending it off to Al, we had to get some photos. So we jumped in the van and took it out to Burbage in the Peak District on what was possibly the coldest and windiest day this year. But hopefully you'll agree, it was worth it...

Specification

For those of you wondering about the details of the build kit, here is is in full:

We'd like to say thanks to Al for trusting us with this project. It was a lot of effort to get everything just right, but the result justifies the work. If you have an idea for a custom bike, why not contact us.